You want positive evidence that close proximity to government causes brain damage?

Democrats invented “the sequester” and Barack Obama signed it into law.

Bob Woodward writes for The Washington Post (at http://tinyurl.com/abrm948): “My extensive reporting for my book ‘The Price of Politics’ shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of (Jack) Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors. … Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011. … Nabors has told others that they checked with the president before going to see Reid.”

Yet for two weeks now Mr. Obama has been wailing that these minimal federal budget “sequester” cuts — somehow imposed on him by the demonic powers of unnamed minority Republicans — will require him to do terrible things.

Why, on Tuesday, the White House announced the pending cuts had already forced them to release hundreds of illegal immigrants held in detention facilities — something the White House wanted to do anyway, since the last thing Mr. Obama wants to do is the job he took an oath to do, which is to enforce all the laws, including our immigration laws.

Look at the other things Mr. Obama warns the “sequester” cuts will make him do:

Determined to demonstrate that cutting the rate of government growth by a single iota can only cause widespread distress and misery, the administration says when the tiny 2 percent “sequester” spending cuts kick in over at Homeland Security this week, the result will be staffing reductions among the blue-gloved airport goons, resulting in longer lines for passengers. (How much do you want to bet when the “crisis” is over, it’ll turn out few were actually laid off — most were merely told to use some vacation days?)

When anyone really interested in reducing government debt and restoring our liberties would say, “You want spending cuts? OK, we’re closing down the whole shebang. We’re sick of running a police state, anyway. Starting this week, passengers can once again board planes carrying their firearms, the way they could through most of the Twentieth Century. No more crotch-groping, no more metal detectors, no look-at-you-naked scanners, nothin’. As a matter of fact, we encourage law-abiding Americans to top off their magazines with pre-fragmented ammunition like the Glaser Safety Slug, and carry their sidearms onboard open or concealed, as they see fit. We know if you see any crazed Muslims causing trouble, you’ll Do The Right Thing.”

As it so happens, this policy isn’t even debatable: It’s required by the Second Amendment. If you don’t like living in a country where every adult has a right to keep AND BEAR arms — a right which the government is not allowed to infringe — there are plenty of other places you can move, starting with Cuba or Venezuela.

(And if you’re going to try again to claim we “voluntarily give up our right to go armed when we enter into a contract by purchasing an airline ticket,” tell me how you think our government bureaucrats would respond if an entrepreneur announced he was launching a competing, all-armed, all-smoking airline.)

If Mr. Obama wants to claim these “Draconian” budget cuts are going to require him to slash government “services,” why not announce he’s going to lay off the entire DEA, and stop putting people in prison for smoking or growing or selling pot? Why not announce he’s going to lay off the whole IRS, and no one should bother filing their taxes this April — personal income taxes which only cover 40 percent of the federal budget, anyway?

He doesn’t “threaten” those kinds of cuts because he knows they’d have people dancing in the streets, of course.

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“Education funding isn’t a Democratic or Republican issue,” asserts Ruben Murillo, president of the Clark County government teachers union. “Everyone agrees that more funding for education is needed.”

No we don’t. Many of us would like to see the tax-funded schools closed entirely, their budgets reduced to zero, so that education could again be a parental responsibility, as it was for the generation that produced George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Ben Franklin.

The schools aren’t doing much good, anyway. Low-income and minority students can barely spell (spend a few minutes perusing Craig’s list, or even the classified ads in this newspaper, where “dinning tables” are for sale even more frequently than “riffles.”)

The products of these intellectually crippling government propaganda camps are unable to file in alphabetical order, and have no idea how to count change. The fact that higher-income white students CAN do these things is not because they come into the world any smarter (I hope we can all agree), but because they’re taught to do these things not in school, but by their parents at home.

The teachers admit this. After entering into a contract in which they say “Let us take the children out of their homes under coercion and threat of jail for the uncooperative; we’ll educate them all to an equal and socially sufficient minimum standard,” they now whine, “These kids are from broken homes; we get no help or support from the parents; what do you expect us to achieve under these conditions?”

Nothing. So end your coercion-based system. Stop being jail guards. You can teach only those who actively seek to learn.

“As educators, we have reached the point where less funding means less for our students and schools,” Mr. Murillo asserted in an op-ed published in the Feb. 27 Review-Journal. “We cannot continue on this path. Over the past five years, school district budgets have been cut by more than $800 million,” Mr. Murillo asserts. “Teachers and students live daily with the consequences of shrinking school budgets.”

What? Nevada school district budgets are $800 million lower today than they were in 2008?

In fact, Victor Joecks, communications director for the Nevada Policy Research Institute, pointds out the educrats claim $500 million of those alleged “cuts” supposedly occurred in the budget of the Clark County School District, alone.

Yet Mr. Joecks testified before the state Legislature on Feb. 22 (http://tinyurl.com/ccny6ar), that the Clark County School District’s own general fund budget numbers show their general budget was $2.091 billion in 2007-2008, $2.161 billion in 2009-2010, and $2.107 billion in 2012-2013.

In other words, budget growth has been small, but the budget is up, not down. And it’s certainly not down by $500 million over five years, which would put it at $1.591 billion today.

Instead, Mr. Murillo is using the usual trumped-up statist math: They ask for a budget hike from $2 billion to $2.6 billion, and when the budget “only” goes up to $2.1 billion, they call that a $500 billion “cut.”

“This information comes from a budget worksheet created by CCSD and formerly available on the district’s website,” Mr. Joecks testified before a joint session of the Senate Committee on Finance and the Assembly Committee on Ways and Means. “After NPRI published an article detailing this information, however, the worksheet was removed from the district site. Nevertheless, a copy of that publication remains online for your perusal.

“When an organization’s funding remains essentially flat, but its largest expenditure increases by 20 percent, budget challenges are certain. Those challenges, however, result from the massive increases in spending, not from large funding ‘cuts.’ What these out-of-control spending increases reveal is Nevada’s serious need for collective bargaining reforms. …
“Paradoxically, Mr. Joecks concluded, “while local revenue has declined, state funding through the Distributive School Account has increased to its highest level ever.” (http://tinyurl.com/a6znqtb).

The truth is, tax-funded school spending has been going up constantly for 50 years, not only in total, but also per-pupil.

“Nevada has nearly tripled inflation-adjusted, per-pupil education spending in the last 50 years,” responds Andy Matthews, chief of NPRI. (He was actually responding to similar demands last week for more propaganda-camp spending from U.S. Sen. Harry Reid — www.npri.org/blog/bid.6/default.asp). “But that doesn’t mean our kids aren’t still harmed when politicians try, once again, to ‘fix’ education by dumping more money into a broken system.

“Even research from Nevada’s Legislative Counsel Bureau has confirmed that as spending increased during the 2000s, Nevada’s graduation rate plummeted,” Mr. Matthews adds.

The schools lack money? Heck, they’re giving away free breakfasts, free lunches, free health care — expanding into all kinds of social services that were never part of their original mandate … and now they want to go further, to reach down and grab children away from their families at the age of five and even four, to prevent the parents into whose care these children have been entrusted by God from imprinting them with any social values at all, other than those of the Great Collectivist State.

The scaffolding of this entire dysfunctional enterprise nears collapse. And the last muffled cries as the dust settles will be “If only they’d given us more MONEY!”